The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Yet this story, retold and recycled in textbooks, is potentially riddled with misattributions. The virus carried in Sarah Nelmes’s pox lesions was likely horsepox, not cowpox. In a book he self-published in 1798, Jenner acknowledged the fact: “Thus the Disease makes its progress from the Horse [as I conceive] to the nipple of the Cow, and from the Cow to the Human Subject.” Furthermore, Jenner might not have been the first vaccinator in the Western world: in 1774, Benjamin Jesty, a hefty, prosperous farmer from Yetminster village in the county of Dorset, also convinced by the stories of dairymaids who contracted cowpox and then appeared to be immune to smallpox, supposedly harvested lesions from the udder of an infected cow, and inoculated his wife and two sons. Jesty became an object of ridicule among physicians and scientists—yet his wife and children survived the smallpox epidemic without catching the disease.

Not to mention at least one person - I believe it was Cotton Mather, though it's entirely possible my memory's wrong - in Massachusetts.